Search Speakers

John has worked in systems operations for over fourteen years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster, and Flickr. He is now VP of Tech Operations at Etsy, and is the author of The Art of Capacity Planning published by O’Reilly.

Currently, Dion Almaer is an engineering director in Google’s Developer Products group, where he works to commodity developer infrastructure and make sure that external developers have access to the same quality Google products as internal Googlers do. Previously, took part in the software process from his own startups as well as at well-known companies such as Mozilla, Palm, and Walmart.

J. Chris Anderson is a cofounder of Couchbase and an Apache CouchDB committer and co-author of the O’Reilly book CouchDB: The Definitive Guide. He enjoys working on JavaScript CouchApps which can be peer-replicated just like any other data. Chris is obsessed with bending the physics of the web, and giving control back to users.

﻿﻿Martin is interested in pretty much the entire span of development; from investigating new languages and technologies to improvements in already established processes, whatever contributes to creating and deploying code that does what the customer wants and the business needs.

Arnaud joined ip-label in 2006 as a technical account manager, dealing with implementation and customer care for its end-user monitoring solutions. After 2 years of technical engineering, he moved to a business development role working as a presales engineer for direct and indirect customers supporting ip-label’s european network of partners. Since 2010, Arnaud took over the product management of Datametrie, the SaaS end-user monitoring solution developed by ip-label. In 2011, Arnaud spoke about exhaustive end-user experience based on real customer cases at Velocity Berlin. In 2012, he contributed to the development of Datametrie Global Experience, merging active and real-user monitoring methodologies into a single and exhaustive offer.

Joe is the lead engineer for the Google Compute Engine project. He has been at Google for ~8 years and, besides GCE, Joe has worked on Google Talk, Goog-411 and Adwords keyword suggestions. Before Google, Joe was an engineer at Microsoft working on IE and WPF.

Tamar Bercovici is a Software Engineer at Box where she specializes in scaling Box’s database architecture and ORM layer. Prior to Box, Tamar was an early-stage employee at XMPie (now a Xerox company), where she drove the development of the award winning uImage product. Tamar holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Andrew is a PHP and JavaScript developer, web standards advocate and founder of FT Labs, an emerging web technologies division of the Financial Times. His area of expertise is emerging web technologies, particularly on mobile and tablet platforms, where his team created the FT web app, now well known globally as one of the best examples of what can be achieved with HTML5.

As president of leading acceleration solution provider Strangeloop Networks, Joshua considers web performance from a broad range of perspectives, from technical issues to the psychology of performance. Joshua has spoken at Velocity conferences in the US, Europe, and China, as well as at the Web Performance Summit and various Web Performance Meetup Groups. He writes about performance trends, news, and research on his blog, Web Performance Today.

Before founding Strangeloop, Joshua co-founded and served as President and CEO of IronPoint Technology, helping lead the company to successful acquisition by The Active Network. He also served as Senior Vice President, Marketing and Product Development, at NTS Internet Solutions, after having held senior marketing and product roles at MNK and GRAPAD.

Buddy Brewer is the co-founder and CEO of LogNormal, a company that helps people measure, diagnose, and solve web performance issues.

Prior to LogNormal Buddy spent ten years in the web performance monitoring industry building monitoring tools and helping some of the largest web sites in the world solve emerging performance challenges.

Christopher Brown is VP of Engineering at Opscode and previously of
Microsoft, where he was a director of engineering for the Edge Computing
Network within Global Foundation Services. Prior to Microsoft,
Christopher was a founding member, architect, and lead developer for
Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2”). He holds several patents in
the areas of internet routing, VM/runtime hosting, content delivery and
cloud computing.

Mark Burgess is the founder, CTO and principal author of Cfengine. He is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College and has led the way in theory and practice of automation and policy based management for 20 years. In the 1990s he underlined the importance of idempotent, autonomous desired state management (“convergence”) and formalised cooperative systems in the 2000s (“promise theory”). He is the author of numerous books and papers on Network and System Administration and has won several prizes for his work.

Robert Castley is the Lead Solutions Consultant for EMEA at Keynote. Prior to working at Keynote, Robert worked as a Professional Services Consultant at a document management company, Macro 4, where he worked on developing custom web interfaces.
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Robert is passionate about web performance and optimisation and has over 10 years of web development experience. One of his proudest achievements is developing one of the world’s most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses – Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla!

In order to understand current IT organizations, Patrick has taken a habit of changing both his consultancy role and the domain which he works in: sometimes as a developer, manager, sysadmin, tester and even as the customer.

If there is one thing that annoys him badly, it is the great divide between all these groups. But times are changing now: being a player on the market requires you to get these ‘battles’ under control between these silos.

He first presented concepts on Agile Infrastructure at Agile 2008 in Toronto, and in 2009 he organized the first devopsdays . Since then he has been promoting the notion of ‘devops’ to exchange ideas between these groups and show how they can help each other to achieve better results in business.

Anthony joined Hotels.com in September, 2010 as Technical Operations Director and is based in London, UK. In his current role, Anthony is primarily responsible for the operations and support of the Hotels.com global production environment. Prior to joining Hotels.com, Anthony was the General Manager of IT for Virgin Holidays. Anthony has more than 14 years of global IT experience and has held various technical and management roles at companies such as BOC Edwards and CP Ships. Anthony holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Brighton.

Enterprise Architect and Principal Manager with the Vodafone Global Technology organisation. Prior to joining Vodafone I was a senior presales consultant for IBM UK.

15 years of experience in application and integration architecture, technical governance, and program delivery across several industry sectors, but primarily in Telecommunications. I have delivered a wide variety of solutions including multi-national and multi-million pound programs to both budget and time, carrying out management and technical delivery roles. Before specialising in Architecture, I had 10 years experience in system software development, performance analysis and testing in technical delivery and management roles.

I have both breadth and depth of experience with many key technologies, specifically Virtualisation, Online, Service Oriented Architecture and Integration. I have also delivered solutions covering eCommerce, CRM, Billing, and Retail.

Donald Foss has 15 years of Operations experience and 8 years of Performance Testing experience. He designed the original load testing cluster system for Velogic, a start-up company acquired by Keynote Systems Inc. in 2000. At Keynote, Donald manages the consulting team responsible for delivering Keynote Global Testing Services, which performs load-testing and performance tuning work for companies with heavily trafficked Web sites. Earlier he was a Network Engineer at Wyeth Labs, supporting a wide variety of server and networking platforms, and a Senior Systems Analyst with Allergan. He holds the RHCE certification, and graduated from the University of Phoenix.

So… uh… yeah, we can fix the leak, but it’s gonna cost ya. Unclogging the pipes of social interaction for hundreds of millions of users don’t come too cheap. I’m Jackson, a Mobile Engineer at Facebook, and I get out of bed everyday to work on stability, reliability, and metrics collection.

Ben Galbraith is the head of product and developer relations for Google’s Developer Product group. Prior to Google, Ben has alternated between entrepreneurial and executive roles across companies in many industries, such as Mozilla, Palm/HP, and Walmart. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and eight children.

Ilya Grigorik is a web performance engineer at Google, cochair of the W3C Web Performance Working Group, and author of High Performance Browser Networking (O’Reilly). In short, he’s an Internet plumber.

Alexander is currently VP Engineering at SoundCloud, the world’s leading social sound platform. Before SoundCloud he worked as R&D director at Nokia, where he headed Places Development at Nokia’s Location Services and had overall responsibility for the Operations department. Alexander has worked in a wide range of positions (Development, Consulting, CTO) in the software industry since 1996, including co-founding two start-ups.He holds a Masters in computer science from the University of Oldenburg and an Executive MBA from FOM Berlin. Besides computer science Alexander works(ed) as a techno DJ in Berlin’s party scene.

Paul Hammond makes things on the internet. He’s currently working on Typekit, a cloud based font subscription service for web designers. Previously he led a group of hard working supernerds at Flickr. He was involved in early versions of Yahoo Fire Eagle and Yahoo Pipes, and has helped build infrastructure for the BBC, Yahoo Bookmarks and Delicious.

Paul has spoken at conferences on subjects ranging from the future of broadcasting to how to win at Monopoly. He lives in San Francisco with 2 kids and no dog, and keeps an irregularly updated technical weblog at paulhammond.org

Ashraf joined the Telecoms Industry after having worked in games industry for seven years. Working as a Graphics Programmer on console titles such as the BAFTA award winning F1 2010, 50 Cent Blood on the Sand and Brian Lara International Cricket. Ashraf is now trying to drive cutting edge technology development inspired by the games industry into the mobile sector.

Simon has worked at the Guardian for four years in multiple guises. For two of those years he led the ops team through a phase that saw the team grow to three times the size. Now he works on developing internal deployment, monitoring and management tools in an effort to make life easier for developers and operations alike.

Andrew Hutchings (aka LinuxJedi) is a Master Software Engineer for Hewlett-Packard’s Cloud Services division working on the continuous integration and infrastructure for Openstack. He is physically based in the middle of nowhere in the United Kingdom but manages and works with a global development team.

Before joining HP he was a Senior Sustaining Engineer for SkySQL, Software Developer on the Drizzle project at Rackspace and a Senior MySQL Support Engineer for Sun Microsystems / Oracle Corporation specialising in MySQL Cluster and C/C++ APIs. He is also co-author of the book MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development.

Mark Jennings started with the Digital team at Lonely Planet in 2008 during their last large website relaunch. Mark came to London as part of setting up a new Online team in London a little over 12 months ago. As Technical Operations Manager, Mark leads leads the Lonely Planet Online DevOps team and has been driving for metrics driven engineering since attending Velocity Conference in June 2011.

Christian is CTO of Mobile and Co-Founder of runtastic, a leading platform for sport and fitness users around the globe. Christian received his Master’s degree in Mobile Computing at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria). Shortly after completing his Masters, he founded runtastic with three of his classmates in October 2009. In addition, he taught C++ and Windows Phone development at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg. At runtastic Christian is responsible for the development of the runtastic Apps which have been downloaded more than 12 million times.

Gene is a multiple award winning CTO, researcher and author. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written two books, including “The Visible Ops Handbook,” and is now writing “When IT Fails: A Business Novel” and “The DevOps Cookbook.” Gene is a huge fan of IT operations, and how it can enable developers to maximize throughput of features from “code complete” to “in production,” without causing chaos and disruption to the IT environment. He has worked with some of the top Internet companies on improving deployment flow and increasing the rigor around IT operational processes. In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People Under The Age Of 40” list, and was given the Outstanding Alumnus Award by the Department of Computer Sciences at Purdue University for achievement and leadership in the profession.

Jeff Kim is COO for CDNetworks US/EMEA and is responsible for the end-to-end customer experience. Jeff’s responsibilities include leading sales, service, marketing, product management and customer support. Jeff has championed the development of CDNetworks’ Web Performance Suite, and in positioning CDNetworks as the trusted global advisor to enterprise companies with mission critical applications.

Alexis Lê-Quôc started Datadog (datadoghq.com) in 2010, a company that helps developers and ops grok their IT Data. Prior to founding Datadog was building infrastructure software and leading a team of 25 web operations staff as a Director of Operations for Wireless Generation (now a subsidiary of News Corp), supporting several million users in the U.S.

He has done everything from designing scalable infrastructures to racking servers to writing embedded code deployed in teachers’ hands nationwide, for which he gave a talk at the Python Conference in 2006. Earlier achievements involve optimizing the mobile site of Orange for its 25,000,000 subscribers.

Joshua Marantz is a software engineer at Google, where he is tech-lead of mod_pagespeed, a project to build an open-source Apache module for automatically improving website latency and reducing bandwidth consumption by rewriting HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Images. At Google he has also worked on latency improvements in web caching infrastructure and scalable social networking. Prior to Google, Josh spent 20 years in the Electronic Design Automation industry, much of it working on accelerated functional simulation. He holds BS and MS degrees from MIT, in Computer Science and Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

During Bryan’s time at Google, he has contributed to various projects that make the web faster, including Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP, optimizing web servers to better utilize HTTP, and most recently, the Page Speed web performance tool. Prior to working on web performance, Bryan was the first full time engineer on the Google TV Ads team, where he helped to build some of Google’s TV ad auction and video management systems.

Patrick Meenan has been working on web performance in one form or another for the last 15 years and is currently working at Google to make Chrome and the Web faster. Patrick created the popular open source WebPagetest web performance measurement tool, runs the free instance of it at WebPagetest.org, and can frequently be found in the forums helping site owners understand and improve their website performance.

Jerry Miller, Vice President of Technology
As Vice President of Technology, Jerry Miller is the technical evangelist for CDN services and the company, specifically focused on thought leadership, pre-sales, and marketing. He is also responsible for forming our global product strategy and execution to provide our customers with industry-leading cloud services. Jerry brings over 17 years’ experience providing, selling, integrating, and deploying content delivery and digital video products and services along with various technical operations management roles, serving telcos, content providers, and service providers with mission-critical products and services. While driving the next evolution in CDN, he is intimately familiar with the need for high-performing, reliable services from both sides of the equation. Jerry holds a M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University.

Tim Morrow is Head of Site Technology at Betfair, responsible for the delivery of Betfair’s next-generation web site platform, focusing on performance, availability and the capability to continuous deliver business value at a rapid pace.

Tim has over 11 years of experience leading teams to design and build websites and systems using Java and related technologies. Prior to joining Betfair, Tim worked as an Architect at Shopzilla delivering their consumer facing website platform. In addition, Tim has also worked at Qualcomm developing software to support the provisioning of mobile devices and delivery of applications to mobile devices in the Wireless Business Division. Tim also thrived in the entrepreneurial environment during years 2000-2004 of startup, Project.net . As a key contributor to the startup team, Tim designed and built hosted web applications for the fledgling company.

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Tim obtained his BEng degree in Computer Science from Queens University in Belfast. Having spent 13 years in California, Tim recently moved his family to London for the opportunity at Betfair. In his free time, Tim can often be found reading, snowboarding or chasing after his two kids.

Stephen Nelson-Smith is the principal consultant at Atalanta Systems
Ltd, experts in end-to-end automated infrastructure, and Opscode’s
premium training and professional services partner in Europe. Stephen
is the author of the O’Reilly book “Test-driven Infrastructure with
Chef and Cucumber” and is busily working on the follow-up “Chef: The
Definitive Guide”. A passionate advocate of Solaris technology, he
has been using UNIX commercially for more than a decade.

‘ve been a Rubyist for 6 years in London, Prague, and Brussels. I’ve built technical teams and custom software in sectors from financial services to voluntary sector. Now I’m tech lead at Lonely Planet where we’re creating a high performance travel platform. http://kapoq.com

Mark Nottingham has helped develop Web technologies like Atom and HTTP for more than ten years.

Starting as a system administrator and Webmaster in 1995 (back when that title still got comments at parties), he’s become a recognised expert on the HTTP protocol, as well as Web caching and HTTP “APIs”.

This led him to become Chair of the IETF HTTPbis Working Group, an effort to clean up HTTP/1.1 and possibly develop HTTP/2.0.

Along the way, he’s been involved in several other standards efforts, holding positions in the IETF and W3C and writing specifications like Atom and Web Linking, as well as a fair amount of code.

Oliver Ochs is head of software architecture of Holisticon AG (www.holisticon.de), a management and IT consulting company in Hamburg, Germany. During the last years he worked in projects as developer, architect and project leader supporting teams with his comprehensive and detailed knowledge in JavaScript, content management systems and Web portals based on Java. Furthermore he is experienced in giving professional trainings and coachings. He has been recently focussing on modern Web development and new aspects of JavaScript.

Girish has been with Facebook since early 2008 working the on Technical Operations and Infrastructure teams. Having been the only release tools engineer for over two years where the site grew over 10x, Girish has had to use every trick in the book to keep up with the growth of infrastructure as well as number of developers. Today, Girish works out of Facebook’s London engineering office and leads the tools team.

Aaron has worked with the Web since 1997 in the areas of Product, Business Development, UI and Tech. In the past 3 years, Aaron worked as an independent web performance consultant and he spent the last 6 months building Turbobytes, an innovative multi-CDN service.

Dr Andrew Phillips is Head of Systems at the London Multi-Asset Exchange (LMAX), where he is responsible for Technical Operations. LMAX brings the benefits of trading on a financial exchange directly to the web browser of retail customers, using the latest technology to process orders in fractions of a second. Prior to joining LMAX he ran Operations, QA and Architecture teams at Betfair, the world’s leading sports betting exchange.

He has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the Department of Space and Climate Physics at University College London.

Guy Podjarny, or Guypo, is a Chief Product Architect at Akamai. Guy works on Automated Front-End Optimization, and was the co-founder and CTO of Blaze.io, later acquired by Akamai. Guy has been in the web application field for over a decade, moving from Web Application Security to Web Application Performance, but keeping his focus on deep analysis of web pages. Guy is also a self admitted efficiency fanatic, looking to extract the most out of everything, from a packed suitcase to a complex web 2.0 app

Alois Reitbauer works as a technology strategist and evangelist for Compuware’s APM Division. He specializes in architecture and performance related topics in the Java and AJAX space. As part of the product management team he drives the future of the dynaTrace product line and works closely with technology companies on implementing performance management solutions. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences on performance and architecture related topics and regularly publishes articles blogs on blog.dynatrace.com

Michael has worked in system operations for over ten years in the web, healthcare, online media and financial. He started out in the help desk area but moved to operations shortly after starting and has been building and running data center operations ever since. In previous Job he worked for NBC Universal, iVillage, and McDonalds. Currently, Michael the Operations Engineering Director for Etsy..

Nick Satterly is a monitoring engineer in the web operations team for the Guardian. He has spent more than a decade designing and implementing enterprise monitoring systems at large telcos and financial institutions. He is now enjoying using those skills in an agile environment, using open source solutions.

Theo Schlossnagle is a Founder and Principal at OmniTI where he designs and implements scalable solutions for highly trafficked sites and other clients in need of sound, scalable architectural engineering. He was the architect of the highly scalable Momentum mail transport agent. Theo is a participant in various open source communities including Illumos, Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, perl, and many others. He is a published author in the area of scalability and distributed systems as well as a veteran speaker in the open source conference circuit.

NETRADA the leading full -service eCommerce solution provider for fashion & lifestyle has established itself as exclusive partner for renowned European and American brands such as Puma, Hugo Boss, C&A and Görtz.

Whilst he’s not writing articles or running and speaking at conferences, he runs his own development and training company in Brighton called Left Logic. Generally speaking, he’s about as crazy about JavaScript, HTML & CSS as a squirrel is about his nuts during the winter!

Steve Souders is chief curver at SpeedCurve, where he works on the interplay between performance and design. Steve previously served as Google’s head performance engineer, Yahoo’s chief performance officer, and Fastly’s chief performance officer. Steve pioneered much of the work in the world of web performance. He is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites as well as the creator of many performance tools and services including YSlow, HTTP Archive, Episodes, ControlJS, and Browserscope. Steve taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford and serves as cochair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly.

Philip Tellis is a geek who likes to make the computer do his work for him. As chief architect and RUM distiller at SOASTA, he analyzes the impact of various design decisions on web-application performance, scalability, and security. He is the lead developer of boomerang—a JavaScript-based web-performance testing tool. Philip has spoken at several conferences in the past, including FOSS.IN, FREED.IN, Ubuntulive, Linux Symposium, OpenSource Bridge, PHP Quebec, ConFoo, FOSDEM, IPC, WebDU, Velocity and JSConf. He writes for Smashing Magazine and blogs at The Other Side of the Moon. In his spare time, Philip enjoys cycling, reading, cooking, and learning spoken languages.

Frank Thelen is senior project manager at Telefónica Germany. In recent years he has worked in Web projects, e.g., the company’s portals for its fixed network products (dsl.o2online.de). His work focuses on requirements analysis, scrum, and test management.

With well over ten years of professional experience and being a life-long nerd, Adriaan has spent the most recent years of his career as a consultant that enters high-stress situations to fix performance problems on some of the busiest websites in the Netherlands.

When there are no more problems left for him to fix, he advises companies on how to avoid production problems, by looking at the total software delivery process. Customers include big banks, major online retailers and one of the largest employment agencies in the world.

Adriaan is married, has two children and enjoys jogging and reading books in his spare time.

Jeroen Tjepkema is a serial entrepreneur and founder of @GrowthTribe, @MeasureWorks, a startup mentor and public speaker. With MeasureWorks the focus is on speed, usability and analytics. With GrowthTribe he enables companies to find their zero day exploit and build sustainable growth engines. As startup mentor he helps companies accelerate their quest for the right online strategy and product market fit. Next to this, Jeroen is a regular speaker and active in (co-)organizing events such as Startup&Measure, Dutch Web Performance meetup and Webperfdays Amsterdam. Connect with Jeroen on linkedin.

Gavin Towey is a DBA at Box.com working on database operations, performance, and writing tools to make managing databases easier. He has worked with MySQL since 3.23 as a developer first, and has been a dedicated DBA for the past 5 years, and has managed mysql installations with hundreds of instances.

Working on database backed, internet based systems for over a decade, Robert is co-author of the book Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL 8, maintains the phpPgAdmin software package, and has been recognized as a major contributor to the PostgreSQL project for his work over the years. An international speaker on databases, open source, and managing web operations at scale, he spends his days as COO of OmniTI, perhaps the best technology consulting firm on the planet.

Rajiv Vijayakumar serves as a senior staff engineer for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT), where he leads the network stack optimization efforts within the Web technologies group, and works with the chipset architecture team on Web browser benchmarking, profiling, and modeling.

Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest) teaches computers how to make, listen to, and read about music. He received his doctorate from the Machine Listening group at MIT’s Media Lab in 2005 and his masters in Computer Science from Columbia University’s Natural Language Processing group in 2000. His research links automatically extracted community knowledge of music to its acoustic properties to “learn the meaning of music.” His composition and sound art projects consider the effects of machine interpretation of large amounts of media, such as the first actual “computer music” (as in music for computers) of “Eigenradio.” As the co-founder and CTO of the Echo Nest Corporation, Brian architects an open platform with billions of data points about the world of music: from the listeners to the musicians to the sounds within the songs.

I’m so embarrassed that I (Gene Kim) don’t have a bio on my esteemed colleague and long-time member of the Velocity community, John Willis (aka @botchagalupe). I’m just going to have to ask for his forgiveness and tell him that I copy/pasted his corporate bio.

John Willis has worked in the IT management industry for more than 30 years. Prior to joining enStratus, Willis was the VP of Solutions for DTO Solutions where he led the transition to a new suite of automated infrastructure and DevOps solutions. Prior to DTO Solutions. Willis was the VP of Training & Services at Opscode where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks for IBM on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.